From The Horses Mouth – We Liberals Are Stingy.
Bleeding Heart Tightwads
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF from The New York Times:
This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.
Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.
Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.
Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.
The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans — the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.
“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”
Something similar is true internationally. European countries seem to show more compassion than America in providing safety nets for the poor, and they give far more humanitarian foreign aid per capita than the United States does. But as individuals, Europeans are far less charitable than Americans.
Change – just don’t ask us to pay for it.
If there ever was a better case of “do what I say, not what I do”... this is it.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
98% of liberals Favor Public Transit For Everybody Else
December 21st, 2008 at 3:29 pm
And that is why when Harper said the political subsidy would be cut; the left went ballistic – WHAT!!!! WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE SHOULD BE SUPPORTING OUR PARTY WITH OUR OWN DOLLARS????
December 21st, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Too true Alberta Girl! Conservatives give, not only to the party, but to charities they support. Just today, I gave $10 for some Stars Air Ambulance bandaids, and the Stolley Children’s Hospital gets flooded with donations.
Will I donate to Greenpeace, or UNICEF, nope. They fail to realize that ticking off 40% of the population is not good for fund raising.
Did you see any UNICEF boxes this Halloween? No? Neither did I. Why? They decided to support abortion, which meant that all Catholic schools, who had been their biggest supporters, stopped that campaign. Did that bother them, heck no, they are hoping to get government grants to keep going.
December 21st, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I was having a long discussion with two socialists from Austria (I am not sure if they were visiting or were citizens) at the anti coalition rally in Toronto. They were so bent on tax dollars being giving to set up a bigger compasionless social beaurau-crazy (I actualy added the “z” by accident, but it works, so I will run with it)to help “the poor” (I understand there are desperatly needy people, but the bar that decides on who is poor and who isn’t seems to be raised every so often).
I mean, they kept going on about “the right to this the right to that”, I was surprised they didn’t say “the right to a playstation, the right to a sex-change” etc.
I never bothered to ask them who or what they give too…………but I made it clear that I put my money where my mouth is. I gave 200$ the previous day to th CPC, and the day of the rally I took out a Green Party Candidate (I won’t say which riding) to lunch, but the inidividual was very strapped for cash and felt so happy for the gesture.
December 21st, 2008 at 6:10 pm
That’s brilliant. Perhaps there’s hope for real change – change of hearts, as some libs may in fact face the truth about themselves, and do something about it.
December 21st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
It has been my experience that those who are the most generous are usually the most quiet about it. Quiet is not the progressive/liberal way hence they do not tend to see any merit in individual contributions.